InTRo

dotart, cultural association based in Trieste, Italy, promotes since 2009 projects which aim to support and give more visibility to professional and amateur photographers, both local and worldwide.

The 27th of April 2020, dotART launched on its exhibit around platform the Staying Home Together project, one of the free open calls promoted by the Association during the lockdown. The project has been created in collaboration with its long-time media partner F-Stop magazine, an online American magazine founded in 2003 focusing on contemporary photography by emerging photographers who come from all over the world.

For the Staying Home Together project, the theme that has been chosen is that which involved the entire world: the global lockdown due to the Covid-19 emergency.

This volume recounts a new routine seen from our home’s windows, outside and inside. deserted streets, closed clubs and shops, checkpoints, people lined up outside supermarkets, faces covered in masks. A unique worldwide shared experience, lived on a global level without precedents throughout the most recent history, which suddenly changed, at times drastically, routines, certainties, lifestyles, social relationships.

The best photos brought to the call, selected by dotART and by F-Stop’s editor Christy Karpinski, are part of this photographic volume, an F-Stop Magazine exclusive number published both online and printed edition deluxe, officially presented in october during the trieste Photo Days 2020.

dotART Cultural Association

PATRICIo CASSInonI

In this historic time, F-Stop magazine and dotart decided to co-publish an exhibition of photography based on the theme, Staying Home Together. our aim is to explore the current shared global experience from photographers portraying their experience: to highlight images from new routines in our lives, environments, and everyday life. The constantly evolving context of ‘everyday life’ is a term-in-flux in July of 2020, yet after recently viewing images from the 1918 influenza pandemic I was struck by how many similarities are echoed over 100 years ago. It is this similar experience that the most successful photographs are ingrained with, and those photographs are the ones which draw me in. It is that journey into a photograph that keeps me looking at photography. The historical documentation and the shared experience, that’s what makes photography such a powerful storytelling medium.

So much of what has happened to all of us in 2020 is shared experience. how can we not have similar thoughts, feelings, fears, about what is taking place or lies ahead? So many things that are similar across cities, states, countries and continents disclose the universal experience the world is sharing at this point in time. Suffering is universal. Joy is universal. Boredom is universal, hope… anxiety… curiosity… reaction to injustice… as well as expressions of support for fairness, justness, wokeness and equality. The exploration and spirit of community and images which express values and ideals of many shared cultures, religions, and humans the world over are shown. Millions of people are staying at home for the health and safety of ourselves, our loved ones and our communities.

The photos here express a breadth of artistic responses to the pandemic. The psychological effect of the pandemic is evident in the captured scenes of people in isolation, even if they are together as a family or a group. Much of the photographic work deals with a theme of identity in liminal spaces. how will we now define normality? what will come after the time we currently inhabit? what does life feel like now? what will it be like tomorrow? when trauma like this strikes a society, especially a global society, it does not just strike a group of individuals who happen to live in the same place. It exposes how connected we are, and want to be. It is compassion and simply looking out for each other that will support all of us, the arts, and our health, in the days to come.

Exhibitions like this have the power to give prominence to the talents of photographers who take the basic premise of where we find ourselves and offer a deeper understanding of a global, human narrative; not solely due to the nature of documenting the evidence of their lives, but because of their individual experience. There are many different ways to show how the condition of now has impacted each person individually, personally and creatively; and I applaud those here who dare to strike out and find new ground.

Cary Benbow writer for F-Stop

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